Casa de Sertanista

Modernist architect and urbanist Lúcio Costa considered taipa, or rammed earth, used in the construction of Brazilian colonial houses, an expression of authentic rural life. He considered these structures made using this technique to be “legitimate things of the earth,” like anthills or fig trees, and thus connected to the very soil that gave the rural family sustenance and meaning. But he also considered taipaa predecessor of the reinforced concrete that he and his peers would put to use in some of the country’s most revered architectural landmarks. In São Paulo, moreover, the rediscovery of such colonial houses also fed into an idealized image of the seventeenth-century fortune hunters known as bandeirantes, remembered less for their brutal oppression of indigenous populations than as daring pioneers who braved the country’s dangerous backlands in order to find riches and open